Hi. My name is Brighton, and I'm a chocoholic.

My son is definitely a chocoholic and I blame myself. I too, often, fall victim of the Dove Milk Chocolate spell. I can't recall when Brighton's first piece of chocolate was, but it has snowballed and now, now that he is well and able to eat REAL food like chicken, vegetables, fruits etc again, he seems to have also figured out that he can eat Chocolate again.

When we come in from playing outside or we are out on an especially cold day, I stop at Starbucks and get him a kids hot chocolate - which he adores. On Valentine's Day, chocolate rules this house. There is chocolate everywhere. Ok, well not EVERYWHERE but it feels like it. He received chocolate from his valentines, Mom bought (of course) Dove chocolate to give out to his valentines. Personally, I believe there is no better chocolate (except Cadbury from the UK) than Dove.

And of course, there's the mocha. Mom keeps a stash of semi sweet chocolate sauce in the fridge for her morning macchiato. I only put it on the top, in a cross-hatch pattern. I make a macchiato with about 1/4 - 1/2" foam on top of which I drizzle the semi-sweet chocolate goodness. I try to drink my macchiato before my son finds it, but it never works. He sees the chocolate cross-hatch and as soon as he can have access to it- usually on my lap - immediately dips his fingers. Then instead of enjoying my drink, I have to chug it or this will go on for as long as I have it. Even when I'm done, he has to make a wide sweep around the inside of the mug, looking for any remnant of the chocolate sauce. He seems to especially enjoy the chocolate/coffee combination. Terrifying...

So here's a drawing of what I mean by Macchiato as I've learned from working at Starbucks. I guess techinically what I drink in the morning would be a mocha macchiato instead of a caramel macchiato(left) or an espresso macchiato (right). Turns out, there's a lot of ways to interpret what and how a macchiato is made. I couldn't find a defintion of it on Starbucks online, but this is what I've learned. Coffee 101. (If it's not quite right, I'm sure A.J. or Kevin will let me know.)

Learn a little bit of Starbucks speak. Cool.

You can even get a Starbucks Podcast - and you don't have to have an iPod - just download iTunes and you can listen to it on your computer.